Fitbit raises $732M in the biggest ever consumer electronics IPO

By Brian Dolan
07:50 am
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This morning San Francisco-based Fitbit debuted its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange after increasing the price of its shares to $20 apiece: The IPO raised $732 million, making it the biggest consumer electronics IPO in history, according to Dealogica.

The stock began trading on the NYSE above $30 a share. According to CNBC, the average Fitbit insider, including its employees, owned shares valued at about $0.37 cents a pop.

Fitbit's IPO beat out wearable camera company, GoPro's big $427.2 million IPO from last summer, and even topped the former consumer electronics IPO record holder, Duracell, which pulled in $433 million from its 1991 IPO.

Most of the investment community is focused on how Apple's recently launched Apple Watch, which features some of the same fitness tracking features as Fitbit's devices, will impact the newly public company. Fitbit's IPO debuted before Apple has announced any official Watch sales figures. While Apple's higher priced wearable will compete with Fitbit on the high-end, recent analyst reports have also show that lower-priced wearable makers like China's Xiaomi are already making considerable gains in worldwide wearable marketshare. 

When CNBC asked Fitbit CEO and co-founder James Park for his take on competition with Apple and other big companies, he pointed to his company's portfolio of fitness devices, which range in price from about $60 to $250, and the fact that Fitbit devices work across smartphone platforms and not just with iOS like Apple's Watch.

"This is a massive market [and] there is room for more than one dominant player..." Park told CNBC. "The brand 'Fitbit' is really synonymous with health and fitness monitoring and I feel we have really competitive differentiators in this market," he added.

The company, which is profitable, had revenues of $14.5 million in 2011, $76.4 million in 2012, $271.1 million in 2013, and $754 million in 2014. It posted a net loss for the first three of those years but net income of $131.8 million last year. It also posted an adjusted EBIDTA of $79 million in 2013 and $191 million in 2014. For the three months of 2015, Fitbit posted revenues of $336.8 million, net income of $48 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $93.4 million.

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